By Michael Roberts: The solution of the rich and the Bolsonaro administration will be ‘austerity’, namely yet further cuts in public spending (many Brazilian state governments are already bust and starved of funds), privatisations and deregulation of industry and the banks – but, above all, the destruction of Brazil’s state pension scheme. The victory of […]

By Michael Roberts: “Brazil’s productivity has been almost stagnant since 2000; today it is just over half the level achieved in Mexico. According to McKinsey, the global management consultants, more than half of Brazil’s population remain below a monthly income per head of R$560. To cut this level of poverty to under 25% would require productivity […]

By Steven Sampson: “Are we now living in a world where there are indeed new moral visions? Or is this transparency and morality discourse but a cover for conspiratorial, more sophisticated capitalist practice? What kind of world is it when Transparency International representatives are invited to Davos but where they also attend the World Social […]

Lena Lavinas: What is taking place—spurred on by the ‘success story’ of CCTS—is a downsizing of social protection in the name of the poor. Over the past six years these programmes have benefited from boom conditions, as surplus capital flooded into ‘emerging economies’ from the crisis-stricken advanced capitalist zones. Yet how they will weather a […]

By Johanna Oksala, University of Helsinki: “A fundamental feature of neoliberal governmentality is not just the eradication of market regulation, for example, but the eradication of the border between the social and the economic: market rationality—cost-benefit calculation—must be extended and disseminated to all institutions and social practices.” Abstract: The article investigates the consequences for feminist […]

By Milford Bateman and Ha-Joon Chang: “The logic is well known. Universal social welfare systems are being dismantled under IFI guidance, secure public employment opportunities are rapidly disappearing, and formal sector employment are an increasing rarity too. Nevertheless, the hope is that the microenterprise sector can engage the most articulate and vocal of the poor, […]

By Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria: [Abstract] This article examines the new phenomenon of “citizens’ groups” in contemporary Mumbai, India, whose activities are directed at making the city’s public spaces more orderly. Recent scholarship on Mumbai’s efforts to become a “global” city has pointed to the removal of poor populations as an instance of neoliberal governmentality as […]

Capital is a social relation, not a human group (o capital é uma relação social, não uma patota)

It is therefore necessary to criticize the conceptions which attach a central role to the forms of personal domination as well as the demands of “self-management” and a “real democracy” (or “direct”), in all its variants. It is also necessary to underline the limits of a large part of the traditional anarchist discourse, which is too preoccupied with the political and organizational aspects of alienation. The history of failed revolutions is not limited to the betrayal of the good revolutionary people by their leaders, corrupted by the exercise of power – even if this aspect has obviously been added to it. People and leaders often share the same fetishistic ways. In a fetish society, the purest form of self-management is useless. There is no need to break your head on the thousand and one details of a direct democracy guaranteed “anti-manipulation”, about the “mandate” modalities that will exist in a direct democracy or about the right balance of the political unities, if what is decided in the most democratic way of the world is always the execution of unconsciously systemic imperatives.